Spongebob in Heaven
by blackshadowofdarkness
Summary: Was that the only sacrifice made that day?...and what is a sacrifice without consequence?


**Spongebob in Heaven  
**by blackshadowofdarkness

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_AN: Dig your heels in deep and get ready for this monstrocity of a fanfiction masterpiece. And make sure you're wearing your philosophy pants because it's gonna get real deep. No pun intended. This prose is so purple it's downright ultraviolet. Enjoy._

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**Part 1: Denial**

The water is fluffy today, is your first thought.

Pineapple front door shut, you can see your entire day ahead of you even as you take your first step. Repetition has made a casual re-run of your life, dooming and yet treating you to a monotonous path that repeats and repeats itself. Day by day, week by week, burger patty by burger patty.

You smell the hot, earthy aroma of the meat as it flips upward, soaring in a graceful arc onto the sizzling surface of the grill. Six healthy patties, lined up in a row. Is this the present or the past? Or is this the future, replaying the very string of events that made up the past, perpetuating the circle of time?

Time spins itself endlessly, doing lazy flips over itself like the very patty in front of you. Spinning and falling. Then the patty lands, and the past yields to the present.

In a sudden flash you see something different. You see clouds, clouds and sky.

The clouds are not the quaint wiggly flower-shapes that line the ocean's surface you know so well.

The clouds are light and fluffy, and white. In another sudden flash, this time of the mind, part of you realizes that you are somewhere else. Where have you been this whole time? Where are you now? But those questions have to have the same answer. Logic doesn't allow any other choice.

In a flustered haze you decide that you are daydreaming and nothing more. You stared at your spinning meat patty for too long and started to daydream. Soon you will descend from this, whatever it is. Any moment now.

You feel a breeze on your face. Or is it just the air conditioner in your kitchen? One way or another, it calms you. It reminds you of the simplicity of your life, circuitious as it is and will always be. Work, play, feed the snail. Chat with friends and blow bubbles. This is how life should be. You imagine what you will do with yourself once the workday ends. Your friends all live somewhat within walking distance of the establishment, making your after-work commute easy and traffic free. Also contributing to your lack of traffic issues is your inability to drive. The intricacies of civilized life that, when done without, yield to the simplicity you strive to enjoy.

If the weather's right, you will punch out for the day and meet your friend Sandy the Squirrel for a picnic on the beach. You will gather up a towel and some Krabby Patties scrounged from the kitchen at work, prepare a basket, and meet her outside her dome's airlock like a true gentleman. She will already be ready to depart, or maybe she won't because, hey, you know how women are. In any case the two of you will make your way to the beach at a time when the crowd has died down, spread your towel and enjoy the sun. The beautiful sun and wonderfully paradoxical ocean, the gentle breeze and the company of a friend.

At the same time, standing alone like a lost child in the wide expanse of clouds, you have no friends to bear you company. And strange as it may be, you feel as if you never did. When the dull muted existence of confused shock finishes its passage through your porous skull, the questions might start nagging at you, questions like "Where am I?" or "Why do I feel guilty?" Then as you get the hang of the simple questions, more obtuse ones like "If what I feel now is supposed to be happiness, but I can only feel sad and guilty, can Happiness really exist at all?"

You can't tell where you are, for one thing. But you can see yourself in two places at once, and one of the places you recognize but the other you don't. So you revert to your first place, your friendly place. You flip another patty. It sails upward like a bird and lands with sizzling perfection onto the grilltop.

You try to think of Patrick the Starfish, but your mind won't let you think of Patrick the Startish. This is unusual, but thoughts are not inclined to stay still long enough for you to ponder their realism. They are inclined to dart in and out like excited bees in a hive, and your mind darts back to Sandy.

Oh, that simple tree-loving girl. Key to your heart as to the greenery that surrounds her amidst the blue of the ocean, that simple tree-loving girl. It's odd that she stays bound and isolated in that cold glass housing project like a drop of thick oil separate completely from the liquid surroundings, seeing as how she provides more of a connection to so many of the aspects of watery existence than any other being in your life, whether fish or mammal. She is a strange specimen but yet the most normal thing you know; limited but yet so free in her own mind, that simple tree-loving girl who breathes with the gills she never grew, swims with the fins she never found.

You step into the airlock of her dome, having ran like a gazelle straight out the front door of the Krabb as soon as shift was up. The water around you falls, leaving behind it the familiar acrid smell of that ghastly dry land air. Visiting a friend is not without its sacrifices.

(Was that the only sacrifice made that day?...and what is a sacrifice without consequence?)

And with a step you are a fish out of water. You compliment her on her taste in air as you fit your fishbowl over your head. You fill it with water and relax, finally able to breathe. You are a guest in her home, as she is in yours. She garnishes your

fishbowl with a teabag. You steep. It tastes bitter and cool.

The two of you chat for as long it takes to reacquaint yourselves with each other's lives, then you tire. The air all around seems to float lazily between the two of your like a meddling friend. You suggest a change of locale. The beach is nice, you say. She helps herself into her suit and headgear and grabs a picnic towel and follows you outside, and you can't help but feel a sense of relief as you step back into the airlock.

She is with you, as lively as the sun and lonely as the sky around it. Little purple jellyfish buzz in a crooked flight along the path. A clam chirps in the distance, calling for a mate out in the expanse of open water. Your feet press into the fine sand with every step forward, and the nimble squirrel stops to wait for you as you catch up, panting. The sun is beaming down on you, but it's the nice, aquatic sun, not the unpleasant arid light within Sandy's dome.

(You are as a beam of light among the white, fluffy clouds. The sun glares in your eyes like the head of Hades, but pain does not find you. You don't care. Where is everybody? You need help.)

The beach is close. You pad through the thick sand as Sandy skirts merrily alongside you, cheerful if only for the promise of some moments alone and some time to relax.

But it doesn't take you long to realize that "alone" does not cover the breadth of the situation, not yet. You and the girl are not alone. All it takes is a shuffling of sand behind a nearby rock to convey this; all it takes is a shift in the bends of light above as movement pushes the water ever so slightly to see that someone does indeed share your space. Someone new, or not so new but new in heart.

You try to alert the girl. She looks at you with only a smile as you get her attention and you point to the rock, quietly nudging her onwards towards the beach front. She looks back with a shrug and walks alongside you once more without a care for anything or anyone but you. And like her, you fail to see any true danger in letting the notion go as quickly as it has arisen. The ocean is a large place, after all.

(The sky is a large place, after all.)

As you near the coast, a shadow graces your path. You and the girl both notice its subtle presence before you, dark and telling. It is distorted but distinct, fat and rough and fuzzy along the edges like a refraction of your mind upon the sediment of the ocean floor. Three points don its body, two more stretching far back to the shadow's source. Recognition begets relief. The shadow belongs to Patrick.

(The mind is a large place, after all.)

You and the girl wave to your friend. Patrick the Starfish does not wave back. He stares right through you and her into something far beyond, something distant and alien and uncomprehensible. Sandy approaches him with a friendly hand. You do not.

(The void is a large place, after all.)

Patrick takes a step forward. You take a step backward. But Sandy is not with you anymore, nor is she with him, but instead caught tranfixed between his depth and your hesitance. She waits for the opportunity to relax, but it does not come, and it does not come for you. What comes for you instead is the fear of the unknown, for the vast, deep unknown in Patrick's eyes. You glimpse within them a flux and compression of time, in his brain a translation and molestation of truth, and in his mouth a taste for something new to you but all too familiar to him, the taste for blood and for suffering and for misery and mercilessness.

You look at Patrick and Patrick looks and Sandy and Sandy looks at the sharp shard of shell in Patrick's hand and the depth of hell's calling in his eyes.

And with a move as fast as a whip Patrick stabs the shard into and through the body of the girl you love.

Immediately you can smell the blood as it rises in the water, leaving Sandy's lifeless body as she falls to a rubber heap in front of you. She isn't with you, not anymore, and it hits you how many pieces out of the puzzle of your life have been destroyed and sent floating up into the unimaginable heavens with the rising of that blood and you try to turn your head or even avert your eyes against the carnage but you remain as frozen as a statue and Patrick is looking at you like a lion looks at fresh meat.

This is your memory. This is what you see from up above, where you are, where the water is fluffy and the light pierces your gaze.

You remember the glint of Patrick's cold shard of shell as he attacks remember his hot breath on your face as he grabs you as you die. You remember the dizzy array of colors in the sky as you fade away into the expanse of the void.

But no, that can't be right, it just can't. That scenario is absolutely unbelievable. Lies to the very core. No, you have to remember what happened, what really happened. You rack your brain for some shred, even the lightest evidence of another story, another explanation.

But eventually the hope fades away and you are left kneeling there, in the expanse of clouds, with only the knowledge of your beloved's death to call your own.

You look up. The space extends miles ahead of you and behind you and in every direction otherwise.

Time to explore.


End file.
